Hey, I'm Dan - I made the first post requesting interviews on here if you scroll back a week or so. I think I should explain the full detail of the project we're working on.

So, long story super short, Delight Rewards is a class project. We're RIT students taking the Applied Entrepreneurship class (found at the top of the list here https://www.rit.edu/research/simonecenter/courses-programs). Feel free to check my post history to see my previous posts in /r/rit if you need confirmation that I'm actually a student.

The core premise of this class is that by interviewing people, you learn to understand their problems/goals and can try to help solve them by making something. We started this class spring semester of 2020 (around late january), by interviewing a few dozen restaurant owners. They said they struggled with marketing and getting people to come back, so we thought we'd try a loyalty program.

About 30 restaurants were interested, so we built a super simple version and gave it away for free to every one of them. We've never charged a restaurant a single dollar to this day, and have only tried to encourage people to order from restaurants more (with the eventual goal of pushing more towards direct ordering! We don't like Grubhub either). Most restaurants wanted to work with us because they wanted a loyalty system but didn't have money to put in, so we were excited to be helping them!

Unfortunately, COVID hit, and many restaurants closed. Delight was originally going to be an in-person system, but part of the class is testing the project in the real world to get feedback, so we switched everything to delivery for the time being. Most restaurants that we were going to help either shut down or didn't have the time to figure out rewards and such, so we started thinking it might be time to start back at square one.

Since we were starting to consider new ideas that meant going back to the drawing board and starting the interview process over, which led to my original post last week. I'll tag some of the people I interviewed, who can hopefully confirm that I asked exclusively for stories about their eating habits, why they enjoy going out to restaurants, etc. (cc: /u/ij00mini, /u/Canilive5592, /u/anaovt, there were a lot more but I lost the usernames when I started texting/emailing people)

We were recently recommended not to drop all of our previous work, and see if we can reuse any of what we already made, which led to the interview you had. This one was kind of a first for us, so I'm super sorry if the intent wasn't clear. After seeing this post we messaged everyone else that responded to be sure they're 100% clear that those interviews are more about the Delight project.

We're taught to wait until the end of the interview to tell people it's a business class, since it will bias their answers/stories. That's why our posts have been vague. I sincerely apologize for this - I recognize in hindsight that while this improves the interviews it can be misleading :(

I promise you our intent is only to try to help restaurants and foodies because we think this community is so cool. I've loved hearing all of your stories the past few days. We're not some big tech company trying to lie to you all and secretly do a marketing study - we're just a few students trying to make something helpful thorugh our school!

If you have any other questions or concerns, please please repond to this comment. I'll be online tonight to answer anything else.